Thinking Machines Lab is rapidly strengthening its position in the AI race as more former Meta researchers join the startup during a period of major hiring and infrastructure expansion.
Thinking Machines Lab Attracts Former Meta Talent
Weiyao Wang, who spent eight years at Meta, has joined Thinking Machines after leaving the company last week. His previous work included multimodal perception systems and open-world segmentation efforts such as SAM3D.
His move adds to a growing list of hires connected to Meta. Kenneth Li, a Harvard PhD who reportedly spent 10 months at Meta, also joined Thinking Machines Lab this month.
According to the report, talent movement between the two companies is happening in both directions, with Meta previously recruiting several founding members from the startup while Thinking Machines Lab continues hiring researchers from Meta.
Thinking Machines Expands with Key AI Leaders
Some of the startup’s most notable hires include Soumith Chintala, now CTO of Thinking Machines Lab. He previously spent 11 years at Meta and co-founded PyTorch, the open-source deep learning framework widely used in AI research.
Piotr Dollár, another longtime Meta veteran and co-author of the Segment Anything model, is also part of the technical team.
Additional hires mentioned in the report include Andrea Madotto and James Sun, both of whom previously worked on AI-related projects at Meta.
Growth Beyond Meta Recruitment
Thinking Machines Lab is also drawing talent from across the wider AI industry.
The report says Neal Wu joined earlier this year, while Jeffrey Tao arrived after roles at Waymo, Windsurf, and OpenAI. Muhammad Maaz previously held a research fellowship at Anthropic. Erik Wijmans came from Apple, and Liliang Ren joined after work with Microsoft’s AI Superintelligence team.
The company’s total headcount now stands at around 140.
Infrastructure Boost Strengthens Thinking Machines Lab
The hiring momentum comes shortly after the startup signed a multibillion-dollar cloud agreement with Google. That deal gives the company access to Nvidia’s GB300 chips and places it among early users of the new hardware.
The report says the agreement follows an earlier partnership with Nvidia and moves Thinking Machines Lab into the same infrastructure tier as companies such as Anthropic and Meta.
Why Thinking Machines Lab Is Drawing Attention
The startup is reportedly valued at $12 billion. While that is a large figure for a company at this stage, the report notes that some researchers may still see major upside compared with the valuations of larger AI firms.
With fresh talent, growing infrastructure access, and rising industry attention, Thinking Machines Lab appears to be building serious momentum.
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